that mighty upheaval which terminated the ancient Atlantean
life, successive periods of human evolution have followed one another
which have been called in this work the ancient Indian, the ancient
Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, and the Greco-Roman. The fifth period is
that in which humanity finds itself to-day,--it is the present time. This
period gradually took its rise in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteen
centuries A.D., after a period of preparation commencing in the fourth and
fifth centuries. The Greco-Roman period preceding it began about the
eighth century B.C. When one-third of this period had elapsed, the
Christ-event took place.

During the transition from the Egypto-Chaldean to the Greco-Roman period,
the attitude of the human mind and, indeed, all human faculties, underwent
a change. In the first of these two periods what we now know as logical
thinking, as a mere intellectual concept of the world, was still wanting.
The knowledge which a man now acquires through his intelligence, he then
gained in a manner suited to that time,--directly through an inner, in a
certain sense, clairvoyant cognition. He perceived the things around him,
and while perceiving them there arose within his soul the percept, the
image that was needed. Whenever knowledge is gained in this way, not only
pictures of the physical sense-world come to light, but from the depths of
consciousness a certain knowledge of facts and beings arises which are not
of the physical world. This was a remnant of the ancient dim clairvoyance,
once the common property of the whole of humanity.

During the Greco-Roman period an ever-increasing number of individuals
appeared without these capacities. Intelligent reflection concerning
things took their place. Mankind was more and more shut off from the
immediate perception of the psycho-spiritual world, and was more and more
restricted to forming a picture of it through intelligence and feeling.
This condition lasted more or less during the whole of the fourth division
of the post-Atlantean period. Only those individuals who had preserved the
old mental state as an inheritance could still become directly conscious
of the spiritual world. But these were stragglers from an earlier time.
Their manner of gaining knowledge was no longer suitable for later
conditions. For, as a consequence of the laws of evolution, old faculties
of the soul lose something of their former significance when new faculties
appear. Hu